Gentle Introduction to ASP.NET Template Pack (with Angular 2)

I was looking into ASP.NET Core since its inception and here I got a chance to write a small post on a Visual Studio Template Pack. ASP.NET core was released in last year as a complete rewrite of .NET framework 4.6 and comes with a new architecture based on .NET Core. Furthermore, Microsoft highlights that “it was architected to provide an optimized development framework for apps that are deployed to the cloud or run on premises”.

Unlike in good old days, I pay attention to a good starting point when I’m building a new application. In that sense, I prefer my tools to be configured in a way that I don’t have to rebuild my client application and publish all changes made to TypeScript and CSS files without interrupting reloading pages. Also, when building the application, it would be nice to have separate builds for development and production. Where production builds can be as minimal as possible to include only what it needs, whereas development builds may contain necessary source maps to aid debugging. Finally, I found ASP.NET Core Template Pack after having a quick search in Visual Studio Marketplace, which satisfies above requirements as a preconfigured starting point. 

I remember the time Grunt was introduced to me, and Webpack is the 2016 version of Grunt. I need a build setup before I run my application since it is mostly written in TypeScript. Therefore, Webpack is responsible for compilation, building and minification. This template is relying on Webpack Dev Middleware usage; hence it is easy to continue changes or modifications to the code already compiled and even to view them in seconds. In this case Webpack compiler remains active in memory and serves incremental compilations to new modification. This also enables the hot module replacement.

Overall my experience with ASP.NET Core Template Pack has been good and I really recommend this as a starting point for ASP.NET projects that uses Angular 2 in frontend. Happy coding 😊

Syиphony 2016

In last June I started posting about conferences that I could attend. Syиphony 2016 is another chapter of that habit, but the only difference is it was organized for IFS employees. The conference was held on last Friday (18^th November) at OZO Colombo. It was my first time presenting in a conference with a software engineering audience and, I was much enjoyed and enlightened at many levels due to the diverse of presentations delivered.

The Syиphony 2016 is the annual conference of IFS’s Product Coordination and, Research & Strategy group. Each team and individuals belongs to the consolidated group whom got acceptance for their talk presents their products, advancements of technologies or any other business that makes a positive impact within the organization.

IFS’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dan Matthews who is the director of Research & Strategy group was the chief guest and delivered the keynote speech. Also, Jonas Högberg, who is the director of Product Coordination group delivred another narrative/keynote speech. The event was full of talks ranging from psychology to continuous delivery to data analytics, but in here I would summarize few presentations that I was really impressed.

Kumudu Widyaratne, a lead software engineer from Product Coordination group presented about technical debt. His presentation was focusing on how developers make projects complicated and possible ways out. My fellow Business Intelligence team member, Isham Mohamed presented about stream analytics. This session was more of a practical one with a demo accompanied at the end, which is somewhat similar to Scott Hanselman’s presentation about IoT. But the most enjoyed talk was delivered by IFS Labs software architect Sukitha Magallege, which was named as “On Diapers and Things”. He articulated how to build a fault tolerance system by sharing his experiences being a novice father.

I presented about deep learning and some advances of it. Also, I was able to mention the work being done by Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Humanity Institute and OpenAI in my presentation. Finally, the event was concluded by the closing note given by IFS Product Coordination and, Research & Strategy group director Indrajith Pradeepa. He explained his expeditions of learning about hiking and lessons we could learn for the betterment of both as an individual and an organization.

Syиphony 2016 Organizers. Image credit: Isham

There was an after party at the end of the day, where we got a chance to discuss about the talk and work being done within our group. But most importantly, both me and my colleague Isham got a chance to sit next to IFS CTO and have an inspiring open discussion about his career. The essence of all success we had at Syиphony 2016 was its organizing team and I’m really impressed about their work, kudos to the Syиphony 2016 organizers.